After the farce of David Nutt's dismissal comes the tragedy of the coming collapse of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). We must hope that the home secretary did not intend to destroy this most respected and long-standing of government advisory committees when he dismissed its chair in a fit of pique. That he did not consider the implications of his impulsive decision is hardly reassuring.

The government can probably limp through to the next general election without a functioning advisory council. Recent home secretaries have made it plain that they do not much care for its advice in any case. After the election it will be someone else's problem to sort out the mess.

As for why Professor Nutt was sacked, Gordon Brown is the latest member of government to try to explain the inexplicable. In prime minister's questions yesterday he said: "The issue was not the ability of the committee to give advice or the expertise of the members. The issue is that once ministers have had to decide a position … it does not make sense to send out mixed messages to the whole of the community about drugs and that's why the home secretary made his decision." It is one thing to put up and shut up if you are on the government's payroll. But the suggestion that the only public contribution that unpaid independent academics can make is to cheerlead for government policy is absurd.

In the short term the implications for drugs policy are significant. As Nutt pointed out at a press conference yesterday morning, a number of important ACMD projects are now under threat. Detailed work on Spice, herbal substances laced with cannabinoid-type compounds, could well be held up, with implications for any legislative programme. He and other members of his erstwhile council are also very concerned about the dangers of ketamine, currently a class C drug. In evidence to the home affairs committee last week before his dismissal, Nutt indicated that reclassification to class B might be in order.

For all the government's tough talk on drugs the fact remains that Nutt's dismissal will make effective drugs policy more, not less, difficult to implement.

The home secretary's supporters like to put it about that it is for scientists to advise and for ministers to decide. There is much truth in this. No one really wants to live in a technocracy where ministers merely rubber-stamp whatever the experts propose. But the corollary of this is that scientific experts must feel able to give their honest opinion and engage in vigorous public debate without fear of being duffed up in the bike sheds. The next government really has to be clear about what it means to have genuinely independent scientific advice.

When we invited David Nutt to deliver his lecture back in July we did so because we felt he had something of interest to say. We published the lecture last week because we felt it was in the public interest for there to be a grown-up, evidence-informed debate about drugs policy. A petition on the Downing Street website and a rapidly growing Facebook group in support of evidence-based drugs policy are signs of a public hunger for such a debate. A public event next week will seek to continue this process.

Yet the bile and vitriol of recent days demonstrates how far we are away from such a debate, while reinforcing why it is so necessary. A genuinely independent drugs advisory body that can present its findings directly to parliament, the media and the public without the dead hand of Home Office interference, is a prerequisite for such a debate. It is possible that the home secretary and the ACMD will be able to find a way of delivering this. If not, an independent body of the kind proposed by David Nutt is not only desirable. It is necessary.